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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27687721">all the stars are dying (like everyone that i'll ever know)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentaghastly/pseuds/pentaghastly'>pentaghastly</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Queen's Gambit (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Post-Canon, Substance Abuse, The End, and beth and benny are TOGETHER AND IN LOVE, i've never loved a character like i do her i s2g, i....i love them your honour, this is very stream of consciousness beth-centric</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 02:00:53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,016</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27687721</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentaghastly/pseuds/pentaghastly</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>She likes him. She doesn’t like New York but she could make a life here, a life with chess in the morning and curling up on the floor at night, reading books about strategy and making each other laugh. Once the thought comes it lingers, sticks, positioning itself neatly between her Alekhine and her Latvian as if it has been there all along. It fucking terrifies her. She’s never known anything like it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He grins, crooked and sweet, and turns his back to fetch the pot of coffee. Adjournment. The minute he turns to face her they’ll pick right up where they left off.</em>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Beth Harmon/Benny Watts</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>499</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>all the stars are dying (like everyone that i'll ever know)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>mam i love them</p><p>title is from june gloom by allie x</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She’s fifteen years old and she’s going to be a Grandmaster. This isn’t something that she ever decided; she <em>knows</em>, knows it in the same way her lungs know to breathe. In. Out. Knight takes rook. There are times when Beth thinks that she has never known anything else.</p><p>“Sometimes,” Alma says to her, words punctuated with a sip of her drink, the sickly-sweet smell of beer and cigarettes coating her words. She’s never known just how comforting such a combination could be. “Sometimes I swear it’s like you’re speaking a different language all together. I’m telling you, none of this was in the adoption handbook.”</p><p>Is that a joke? It must be, Alma’s head tossed back in bubbly laughter, but Beth can never be certain.</p><p><em>Time for an icebreaker,</em> her teachers say, all in the same tone of voice, all to the same groups of students who couldn’t care less about the things they have to say. <em>Tell us your name, age, and what you want to do when you’re out of school.</em> The girls want to be mothers, models, actresses, nurses, mothers. The boys want to be doctors, actors, engineers, politicians. Beth doesn’t judge them for this, not the least because she doesn’t care enough to try. They can’t help who they are. They can’t help that they have never been allowed the opportunity to become more. </p><p>It’s almost her turn now. She breathes—in, out—steels her shoulders, cools her gaze. Fights the urge to keep her hands from clenching in the fabric of her (cheap, second-hand, ill-fitting) dress. What a strange game, she thinks. What a strange thing, to know that three meaningless facts will define how her peers look at her for the rest of the year.</p><p>Beth Harmon. Fifteen. Grandmaster.</p><p>She practices the words in her head. </p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>Beth is seventeen and her mother is dead (<em>mothers</em>, plural, two for the fucking price of one) and she’s a half-open file. She stares at the ceiling at night and doesn’t count squares, not anymore. Sometimes it’s Alma’s face and sometimes it’s Mr. Scheibel or Jolene, Benny Watts or D.L. Townes. On the very worst nights there isn’t anything at all, only her, Beth Harmon with a mind that’s too loud and nothingness reflected back in the cracks that line the empty white space.</p><p>She wakes up at five in the morning and makes a pot of coffee that never turns out right, never quite how Alma used to, and it sits there and cools until Harry wakes up and she <em>paces</em>. Her feet leave indents in the carpet, like it’s beginning to learn her routine. Beth doesn’t like being so predictable.</p><p>“This is delicious,” Harry tells her, still sipping politely from the mug even though it’s long since cold.</p><p>“It’s disgusting.”</p><p>“It’s…” He sighs, grins, as if they share some kind of secret. “It’s unique. Like you.”</p><p>“Harry.”</p><p>“Beth.”</p><p>“We’re already sleeping together. You don’t have to lie to try and get me into bed, although the effort is admirable and certainly appreciated.”</p><p>She means it as a playful tease, flirtatious and funny. The look on his face implies that he doesn’t take it as such. It’s a shame because Beth truly does like Harry—he’s charming and kind and he takes all of her oddities and quirks in stride with more grace than anyone she’s ever known—but he doesn’t <em>get</em> her. When he looks at her it’s like he’s staring at a painting, memorizing the details on the surface. It becomes more and more apparently every passing day. She wonders if he’s is as conscious as she is of the expiration date printed clearly on their foreheads.</p><p>“Beth Harmon,” he begins, and as much as she tried to deny it to herself…she knows him. She knows how desperately he wants to say something more, knows that he takes another gracious sip of the drink to keep the words down. “Well then. I think that you just might be right. It is truly disgusting.” </p><p>“I don’t mean to brag,” she says, lips curling to match his own. <em>See?</em> her expression is meant to tell him, <em>I’m right here with you. I’m in on this too.</em>. “But I think I just might make the worst cup of coffee in the world.”</p><p>“One might even call you a prodigy.”</p><p>“They could, but they’d be wrong. I’m far too old.” </p><p>They laugh, but Beth has a feeling each of them are finding humor in a different joke.</p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>She’s four years old and her mother (first mother, dead mother, <em>real</em> mother) cuts her bangs on the floor of the trailer with a pair of sewing scissors, choppy and uneven, fraying at the edges. She’s too young to know how ridiculous she looks. Her mother’s fingers brush the red strands off of Beth’s cheeks and the motion isn’t tender, not by a long shot, but it’s her favourite feeling in the world.</p><p>“One day, Beth,” she says, “someone’s going to try to own you. They’re going to try to tell you what to think, what to <em>feel</em>—and you’re going to be so much smarter than that. Too smart to belong to anyone other than yourself.” </p><p>She doesn’t say anything back. Of course she doesn’t; she’s fucking four years old and she doesn’t understand any of the gravity of what her mother is saying to her. Every word is little more than a soothing buzz. Every sentence is warped and jumbled, especially now, especially in her memories. The only thing that she remembers is fragments.</p><p>Cool metal brushing against her forehead. The gentle melodies of the cicadas drifting like a whisper through the open window of the trailer. The <em>snip snip snip</em> sound of the blades. The breeze against her skin when the hair that had been covering it is gone and she’s left unshielded, open and exposed but safe against her mother’s touch. She doesn’t know that it will be years before she feels like this again. She doesn’t know that it will not be so very long before there will be times where she hardly remembers feeling like this at all. </p><p>“My clever girl,” her mother says. Beth loves the way it sounds. Clever. Hers. She wants to live in this memory forever. The pills are wearing off and she doesn’t want to go back, she’s not ready, <em>she doesn’t want to—</em> “Don’t you ever allow the world to have any more hold over you than it already does.” </p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>She’s seventeen and high as a kite and dancing on fucking cloud nine and the world doesn’t own her, goddamn it. It couldn’t if it tried.</p><p>Nobody fucking owns Beth Harmon but herself. </p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>She’s eighteen and Benny holds her like he never wants to let go.</p><p>Which is strange, isn’t it? He’s the one who had laid the rules out so clearly, well before Beth had known that theirs was even a situation that required rules to begin with. <em>About sex—forget it.</em> Even now the statement echoes. The gravity of his tone. The seriousness of his words that had rattled her down to her core. She’d been so certain up until that point that he wanted her too, the same way Harry had, the same way she’d hoped Townes might. Benny Watts, refusing her advances from the outset. Benny Watts, denying her ownership before she’d even attempted to look at the lease. </p><p>And now he rests his cheek against her shoulder blades, knight to f3. She is lying in bed with her back to Benny and she is watching his opening and staring at the board, defenses stacking up one after another, none of which seem to fit. Knight to f3. Pawn to—</p><p>Pawn to—</p><p>“I can feel you thinking,” he says, lips warm against her skin. “It’s distracting.”</p><p>She wants a drink. She doesn’t tell him that.</p><p>“Maybe I want you distracted. Maybe,” Beth shrugs her shoulder and she can feel his face roll against her skin, jostled by her sudden motion, “maybe me moving here, me kicking your ass at simultaneous speed chess and seducing you immediately afterwards was all one elaborate plan to permanently throw you off of your game. Have you considered that?”</p><p>He doesn’t laugh but he grins, the gentle stretch of his mouth against her back soothingly familiar, and when it comes to Benny that essentially feels like the same thing. “Minx. Arrogance isn’t very becoming on a young woman, you know.”</p><p>“And yet you slept with me anyways. What does that make you?” <em>That</em> prompts a laugh at him. She’s oddly proud.</p><p>“Pathetically weak,” he says, “and pitifully human.”</p><p>It’s hardly a romantic sentiment. It’s hardly <em>anything</em>, two people sharing jabs, skin on skin, flesh on flesh. It’s casual and gentle and cruel, the knowledge that all of this is going to be ending soon, the familiar sands of time creeping up behind Beth’s other shoulder. But it’s okay, she thinks, because he doesn’t own her. He’s probably the only person that she’s ever met who doesn’t even think to try and do so. </p><p>“The Great Benny Watts, <em>human</em>. What on earth will all your adoring fans say to that?”</p><p>“Oh, please. You’re not going to tell them.”</p><p>“And you know that how, exactly?”</p><p>“I know that,” he says, kissing the space between her shoulder blades, the curve of her spine, “because I know you, Beth Harmon. And because I know that I’m getting awfully good at shutting you up,” he says, and God damn it, he’s right.</p><p>Benny Watts, cool and calm and cradling her like he never wants to let go. There’s a punchline in there somewhere, she’s certain of it. Beth just doesn’t exactly feel like laughing right now.</p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>She’s twelve and she knows: over half of chess endings are rooks.  </p><p>That is not to downplay the importance of any single piece. That is not to tie chess up with a bow into one simple entity, a feat which has never and will never be done, and God knows that more than enough people have tried. And they’ve <em>tried</em> studied the pieces, written the books (the ones she doesn’t think she’ll ever need and doesn’t think she’ll ever care to. Why would she? Everything that she needs to know is everything that the pieces have taught her).</p><p>Over half of all chess endings are rooks. Beth doesn’t remember how old she was when she learned such a thing, but now that she knows it she doesn’t know that she could ever forget. It’s carved into her DNA, embedded deep into her marrow in the same way every other part of chess has been.</p><p>Sometimes Jolene brushes her hair the same way that her mother used to, lacking any of the gentleness or grace but full of the same tender affection that shouldn’t be familiar but is. Has somehow managed to remain so after all this time. She cuts her bangs. She calls Beth <em>sister</em> and they’re not, obviously they’re not, but it’s closer to family than Beth has ever known. Well. Closer than she <em>knows</em> that she’s known. </p><p>She doesn’t really remember her mother. Bits and pieces. Memories that stand out in her mind, so close that she can nearly touch them but not quite close enough. She remembers her mother; she doesn’t remember her mother’s laugh. She doesn’t remember the sound of the scissors. </p><p>She remembers her mother’s hand stroking gently against her cheek.</p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>She’s seventeen years old and she’s not a fucking Grandmaster. </p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>She is…she doesn’t know. She’s not sure. Maybe she isn’t anything at all. Maybe she never has been.</p><p>(What she is:</p><p>She’s overdosing on a handful of little green pills stolen from a jar in a locked room, but she’s far too young to have ever heard that word and she doesn’t know that there’s a way to describe this feeling. <em>Nothing</em>, deafeningly loud, battering her eardrums, echoing in the ever-slowing pulse of her heart. </p><p>This should be leading her somewhere. This should be a turning point. This should be the moment where it clicks, where everything shifts, where she learns her lesson and heads down a different path.</p><p>It isn’t.)</p><p>Maybe she’ll never be anywhere other than here.</p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>She’s eighteen and she likes it in New York. She’s comfortable here. She’s safe.</p><p>That’s where all the trouble lies.</p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>“You’re staring again.” Has she been? Yes, Beth thinks, that seems likely—every time she looks at him she finds it increasingly difficult to stop, moth to a flame, losing herself in the lazy flop of Benny’s hair against his forehead. It’s becoming a problem. </p><p>“You have milk in your moustache.”</p><p>His tongue flicks out the corner of his mouth, far more seductive than she thinks he intends for it to be. “How’d you sleep?” he asks, so casual that she might think the tone was forced if it came from anyone else. Benny doesn’t bother looking up from his newspaper as he talks to her which is…it’s annoying, actually, and more than a little bit offensive. She’s seventeen and flouncing around his apartment in barely-there cotton pyjamas and it’s as if he’s making a point to look at anything other than her.</p><p>“Oh, wonderfully. Turns out a deflating air mattress is great for the spine.”</p><p>“You don’t say. And the sirens?”</p><p>“Like a lullaby. Better than anything they sang to us at Methuen, anyways.”</p><p>“Methuen.” The teasing is gone from his tone and Beth knows that she has made a mistake. This is territory she had no intention of wandering into with him. These are dangerous waters to try and tread in their playfully combative but deliberately casual relationship. “That’s the orphanage, right?” </p><p>“It is. More coffee?”</p><p>“Beth.” She hates the way he says her name. Like he knows her. Like he cares.</p><p>“Benny.”</p><p>“We don’t have to talk about it.”</p><p>“I wasn’t planning to.”</p><p>“We don’t have to,” he says again, and—Jesus, she wants to kiss him, and the worst part is that she’s not sure if she wants to kiss him to shut him up or if she wants to kiss him because it’s <em>Benny</em>, because she’s been staying in this shitty basement suite for two weeks and he knows her. He does. “That’s it. We don’t have to.”</p><p>She waits for the <em>but</em>, the <em>dot dot dot</em>, the trailing ellipsis leading to an exception. It doesn’t come.</p><p>(“<em>We don’t have to talk about it</em>,” Harry would say, about the orphanage, her mother, Alma, the pills. He meant: <em>we don’t have to talk about it, but we should. You should want to. Why don’t you want to?</em> She’d never had a good enough answer for him.</p><p>Benny doesn’t say it like that. He doesn’t say it like that at all.)</p><p>“I know,” she tells him. She does.</p><p>Beth Harmon is eighteen and an orphan twice-over, living in a New York basement suite with Benny Watts, sleeping on an inflatable mattress on is floor, and she wants to kiss him. Even now, even sober as a judge. She likes his hair. She likes him. She doesn’t like New York but she could make a life here, a life with chess in the morning and curling up on the floor at night, reading books about strategy and making each other laugh. Once the thought comes it lingers, sticks, positioning itself neatly between her Alekhine and her Latvian as if it has been there all along. It fucking terrifies her. She’s never known anything like it.</p><p>He grins, crooked and sweet, and turns his back to fetch the pot of coffee. Adjournment. The minute he turns to face her they’ll pick right up where they left off.</p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>She’s fifteen years old and she has a crush.</p><p>Townes is beautiful. Beautiful like she’s never known a man could be. Beautiful in the way that <em>aches</em>, in a way that lingers dead in the center of her vision like sun spots long after she turns away. He’s clever and kind she knows that she’ll never meet another man like him, knows it down to the marrow of her bones. Nobody will ever speak to her like he does. Nobody will ever look at her like he does, like she’s more than a little girl playing a big man’s game. </p><p>Like she’s <em>something</em>.</p><p>Beth watches him from across the hall and wonders, absent mindedly running through the motions of another pitiful match, if he’ll remember her the same way she knows she’ll remember him. If he’ll ever think of her at all.</p><p>Her game ends in sixteen moves. </p><p>Although, really, it was over before it had even begun.</p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>She’s nineteen years old and happiness is at the bottom of a vodka bottle, a pill bottle, a pack of cigarettes spread out across the kitchen counter and an ashtray in the corner of the room. Unwashed dishes stacked in the sink. Dirty laundry making a mountain in the middle of her mattress. Vomit in a chess trophy. Her stomach turning into an elaborate assembly of knots. Her mind living in fifteen places and nowhere at all.</p><p>Her mind is at Methuen with Jolene and a basement with Mr. Scheibel, the front porch with Harry and curled up in bed with Benny, Benny in New York, Benny over the phone asking her to come back.</p><p><em>We don’t have to talk about it.</em> She wants to talk about it now. Wishes she had. Each time the thought comes, the wishing, the regret for things she’d be better off forgetting, she takes another pill. It’s easier not to talk about things when you’re minds too fogged up to even try.</p><p>Her mind is in a bathtub in Paris waiting to drown, wishing she would. Wishing she wasn’t too much of a coward to let it happen.</p><p>It’s easier to leave everything behind. It’s easier to be nowhere. Empty. A sad little orphan girl overdosing on a handful of pills she stole from behind a locked door, body leaving mind, chasing that feeling of emptiness from the first time she realized such a thing could exist. Caïssa, the goddess of chess, dancing in her living room in her underwear. A classic Greek sacrifice. If nothing else, at least she has this. </p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Dear Benny,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In this box you will find a bottle of expensive Russian vodka, the only bottle that I purchased on my trip and the only one that I’ve purchased since. I have stared at it for the past five days since returning home and, as I’m sure you can see, the seal remains uncracked, the bottle completely and entirely full. I haven’t even been tempted. It’s pretty incredible, what hitting rock bottom can do to a person. Funny how it took ruining every important relationship in my life to realize how many I actually had.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I don’t expect you to reply to this letter. You can even throw it out if you like, or light it on fire if you think that would be more symbolic. I’m not saying that to guilt you—I truly want you to know that I send this with no ulterior motives and no expectations attached. I’m sober as a judge and I feel like I’m seeing everything the way that I should have been. The only thing that hasn’t changed is how I see you.</em>
</p><p><em>I didn’t need you to fix me. I hope you know that. I fixed myself. You just made it a lot easier. You made me </em>want<em> to fix me. You reminded me that I had still had things worth fixing myself for.</em></p><p>
  <em>Moscow is beautiful this time of year. I wish you’d told me that. I wish you would have been my second.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And I’d like to talk about it someday. I know we don’t have to, but…I’d like to. If we could. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>See you when I see you, Benny. If you ever want to come on by Kentucky, well, I promise I’m not going to make you sleep on the floor.</em>
</p><p><em>Beth.</em> </p><p> </p><p>.</p><p>She’s eight years old and they light her dress on fire, the one with her name stitched across the front like a badge of honor. They call her <em>Elizabeth</em> and they say her name like a scolding, even when it’s meant to be warm. She’s alone.</p><p>It’s easier that way.</p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>She’s twenty years old and the drive time between Kentucky and New York is over twelve hours. Beth knows this because she’s planned the trip out in her head before, wondering if she could do it on her own, questioning if there would be anyone there waiting for her when she knocked on his door. Eventually she’d though the better of it but the map still sits on her living room table, the route drawn in bright red ink.</p><p>“You planning a trip?” Benny asks, voice softer than she’s used to, rougher than she remembers. He looks old. Maybe that’s what twelve straight hours of driving does to a person.</p><p>“Thinking about it. Not anymore, though.” </p><p>“No?”</p><p>“You’re here, so…” The words trail, linger, hang in the air between the two of them. She lets them stay. <em>You’re here and not there, so there’s not really a point in me going anymore</em>. The rest of the sentence is obvious, anyways. </p><p>There’s no chess metaphors that stick here. This isn’t a Catalan, a Ruy Lopez, a King’s Fianchetto. Over half of all chess endings are rooks but Beth doesn’t have the slightest idea where this one is going to lead—her hand hovering over the board, terrified of his next move. Every piece is his. Beth Harmon, sober as a judge, giving Benny Watts every single thing she has to give. Somehow she thinks she should have seen this coming. </p><p>“I’m really proud of you, Beth.” </p><p>
  <em>Oh.</em>
</p><p>“Well, I couldn’t have done it without you. Or I wouldn’t have wanted to, anyways.”</p><p>“Not Russia. I am proud of you for that, obviously, but—" he waves a hand, motioning to the carpets that are spotless and liquor cabinet, long-since emptied, the kitchen counters that have been cleared of cigarette butts and beer cans from the moment Beth returned home, sober and ready to stay. “I’m really fucking proud of you.”</p><p>“I know what you meant, Benny. You know what I meant, too.”</p><p>He steps towards her, a move that Beth mirrors. This isn’t chess; this is dancing, skirting around the edges of what they both want to say, seeing how long they can make it before one of them gives in. She would have enjoyed this once, would have kept the waltz going for as long as possible just to toy with him, but it’s three in the morning and Beth is twenty and she’s tired of playing games. At least when it comes to him. </p><p>“You said you weren’t going to make me sleep on the floor. In your letter.”</p><p>“I did.”</p><p>“Well, the couch <em>does</em> look awful comfy.” </p><p>She laughs, startled, bright, the sound slipping out of her before she’s even aware that it’s a sound she can make. And he’s grinning, looking at her like a delighted child—Benny Watts, cowboy hat hanging on her coatrack, wearing a leather jacket that’s far too big for his frame and looking at her the way that he always has, like he can see right through her. Like he <em>likes</em> what it is that he sees when he does.</p><p>Benny Watts, backlit by a dim table lamp, staring at her like she’s something worth keeping, standing in her living room in Kentucky like he never plans to leave.</p><p>“I missed you,” she tells him, not the three words she wants to say but the ones that she feels as though she can, tucking everything else in her back pocket for later. It’ll be good, she thinks, to have something else up her sleeve. She’s not done with surprising him yet. “Take me to bed, Benny.”</p><p>She sleeps better than she has in years. </p><p> </p><p>.</p><p> </p><p>She’s fifteen and she’s going to be a Grandmaster.</p><p>She’ll figure out the rest later.</p><p> </p><p>.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>comments &amp; kudos make my day xx</p></blockquote></div></div>
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